13 December 2015

Students For Western Civilization: Trolls, But Still Interesting (Part II)

In late November we published an article about a group trying to establish itself in a number of Canadian and American universities and colleges. While Students For Western Civilization may or may not be a hoax, we still consider the topic to be of some interest in that some previously unnamed individuals who we've been looking at for a few years have popped up in relation to the group.

When VICE published an article on this movement back in September, we began to focus on some of the people who were posting in the comments section. Two in particular jumped out at us:

"Tyler" Malenfant (actually Marc Malenfant) from Toronto was one of the more active participants in the exchanges that took place in the comments section:

Malenfant and this blog's lead author also had a rather enlightening exchange in which he admits a friendship (albeit a Facebook friendship) with Matthew Heimbach who's association with Students For Western Civilization has been featured in Heidi Loney's article, "The Mainstreaming of White Pride":

Now, there was something about Marc "Tyler" Malenfant that suggested that we would find him elsewhere online and probably acting in very much the same manner as he had been on the VICE article. Sure enough we found him commenting on an Al-Jazeera article from April of this year:

A lot of chest thumping arrogance from someone who really doesn't understand what he's actually talking about. Nothing we haven't seen repeatedly before. None of this is all that interesting. What IS interesting was this post inviting two of his friends to participate in the discussion:

Dmitri Balitsky. A name that jumped out at as as we had been keeping tabs on him for a significant amount of time.

As he was then still a minor (he is now over 18 and attending Algonquin College) we didn't publish anything about him specifically or the group he claims to have founded, the Fatherland Front.

Point of fact, the Fatherland Front was mostly a "group" found exclusively online. And it didn't start out as a fascist-orientated hate group either. In fact at one time the political leanings were decidedly left of center:

Eventually, there appears to have been somewhat of a split in the membership (such as it was) as "Dmitri Balitsky" moved towards the far right:

Thus, the Fatherland Front was born.

Now, as noted earlier the Fatherland Front didn't really amount to more than a Facebook/VK group in which the members, "Dmitri" in particular, would post pseudo-intellectual comments on matters of ethnicity, antisemitism, and what they believed to be "traditional" society:

Yeah, a bit of overkill on the screen shots, but as we've had them for a few years now we thought this the best time to share them all.

While the Fatherland Front may have been primarily an online association, it may also be that they (and specifically "Dmitri") did engage in at least some real-world activities:

Translation: "Nick and I have continued the legacy of 14 words"

If one were now to search for the Fatherland Front on VK or Facebook, one will find that it no longer exists. Apparently Dmitri replaced it with this:

Among the members include Marc Malenfant:

Marc attends Ryerson according to his VK profile. We find this to be especially interesting.

The second person who caught our attention was this handsome fella:

Patrick Jolin, attending Guelph University, is also a supporter of Students For Western Civilization. And by coincidence, just as White Student Union flyers where discovered and removed at Ryerson where Malenfant attends, Guelph also had to deal with the same flyers were found on that campus.

Jolin also echos much of the pseudo-philosophy that we found in Dmitri's writings:

Our observant readers will have noticed a familiar name again. In the case of Jolin, however, Dmitri appears to be more than just a Facebook friend:

Photo posted almost 2 years ago.... yes, we are that patient.

Learning about the connection that Malenfant and Jolin had through "Dmitri" (we aren't yet convinced that's his real name) has resulted in connections to a number of other people. Andrew Beland for example used to participate on Stormfront and other racially-orientated social media sites, sometimes using the monkier "Romeo Von-Drachengesicht." Bryan Mons is a member of the Regnum Arya group that appears to have replaced The Fatherland Front. Gabriel Alexander Paradis-Knee is an interesting cat too. "Miroslav Mikhaillovych Makovetsky," whom Malenfant invited along with Dmitri to participate in the Al-Jazeera thread, looks to me the Mark who posted some of the updates in the Fatherland Front group.

In fact, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Others we've found that we've linked but who we have yet not profiled have links not only to "Dmitri," Malenfant, and Jolin, but to some figures in the racist movement who would be familiar to our readers such ad Sebastian Ronin and his little Renfield Max Macro. Others are connected to Peter Brimlow, Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, John de Nugent, and, not at all surprisingly, Matt Heimbach.

Do these individuals have anything to do with the posters found on Canadian campuses promoting Students for Western Civilization? It is interesting to speculate, isn't it? We think that the jury is still out but it might very well be a story for someone else to tell.

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